Well it was cheaper then. The fun fact is that the plot for the book came to MC when he was researching genetic engineering. He wanted to write a story about the freaky things companies would be doing to our food and stuff in the future and resurrecting extinct species is kind of the idea illustrated at its extreme. The issue, of course, is who would be doing these things and how would it be affordable (he goes into great deal of description of the three CRAY supercomputers required for the project). Anyway, his genius answer was carnival freak show where people paid the company money to see what they could make, funneling profits into their ambitious patent development in private consumer markets. What would people pay to see? Dinosaurs! Where? A zoo! What could go wrong? Everything!

So there you have the fictional groundwork laid out and several years later they found themselves executing the concept: make dinosaurs, but make people pay to see them in a movie where far less can go wrong, certainly for the end user if not the staff.

Anyway, that's basically the story of Monsanto and the GMO food market. These days CGI is still expensive, but at least the technology has been developed so it's more accessible.

A shit house (an outhouse) is a wooden box with a hole to sit on. Therefore, a brick shit house is an elaborately over built construction. It's saying that something is built far stronger than it has any need to be.